Keith Edgerton, Ph.D.

Professor of History and Department Chair

 

KeithDr. Keith Edgerton is recognized as an excellent instructor and scholar who shares his expertise and passion for history by inspiring independent, disciplined and creative thinking among his students.

“Dr. Edgerton has served this campus for a generation,” a colleague said. “He has worked to cultivate in his students a love of history…and has taken the world into his classroom through his scholarly research.”

The many courses of which he has developed including “Making Sense of the Sixties” and “The American West” are now mainstays of the U.S. history curriculum. Also extremely popular is the “History of Vietnam” a course that was designed and taught to prepare students for a study abroad experience in Vietnam.

He is recognized among his colleagues for thinking expansively and dynamically about learning and for engaging students in and out of the classroom. One colleague notes that Keith’s passion for teaching has inspired other faculty members in the History Department to re-examine their commitment to teaching.

His extraordinary list of professional service is a refection of his leadership, including serving as his department’s chair since 2012, an officer for the faculty union and as the Faculty Association’s president.

“He has worked hard to make teaching on this campus as fulfilling as possible,” a colleague said.

Keith has also embraced a clear commitment to serving the community as a go-to resource for campus and community lectures and panels, an expert in Montana history, western Americana and environmental history. Keeping on top of the latest research and trends of his field, he has written two books and dozens of book reviews and articles. 

“He is a humanist scholar,” his colleague noted. “His scholarship is clearly in service to his teaching—perhaps the best kind of scholarship at a teaching institution like MSUB.”